A lot of people wonder what makes a successful blog. Most of the time it becomes apparent to me that if someone is asking me that question, they don't know why they're blogging to begin with.

Success with blogging, and whether or not you have achieved it, will depend entirely on whether or not you have reached the goals you set with blogging to begin with.

What's that?

You never set a goal with blogging? You started a blog because it was the thing to do?

That's okay, we can fix that. Set some goals for what would make you think that the exercise of blogging was worthwhile to you. What do you want to do with your blog? Talk to your audience? Find out what their interests are? Increase sales?

Of course, blogging success isn't just about making money or getting more traffic. In fact, if you haven't connected with your readers you may never reach either of these ambitions through blogging.

Let me give you a scenario from my own life.

I know that many people get into blogging for the traffic. Well, I already had traffic when I started blogging, so it's not why I began to blog at all. Truthfully, I wanted to be closer to you.

I wanted to be able to share my thoughts about traffic, to give tips and ideas, to report news in real time, and do it in a fast, streamlined fashion. With blogging, every time I do a new post, every page of my site that is part of the blog updates to let anyone who happens by know that I had something new to say. And now that blog posts can be emailed automatically to subscribers, I have another outlet for those who prefer email to the web without doing any extra work.

The best part of blogging to me, wasn't the shift and increase in search engine traffic that I observed. That was a great side effect, partly because it was an effect I could duplicate for my clients.

The best part of blogging was actually getting my first comment. And the thrill doesn't go down with each subsequent comment I get. It makes the spam that sometimes comes through worth it as well. The interaction is by far the best part to me.

Ironically, it is that yearning to do the best for my customers that I can that made my blog popular, a traffic generation tool, and got prospects to opt in to my sales process. And this is how that relates to you.

In the back of your mind, you might have been thinking 'If I become a famous blogger, I'll have all this traffic, and then I can sell more of my product or retire on the advertising income.''

And it's true - with the right strategy, it's not entirely unheard of to get more traffic, more sales, or make money from your content. However, having this as your sole reason for taking up blogging gets in the way of writing content that is compelling to your reader.

A person who sets out to blog solely for traffic or money writes posts designed only to make money, which by its nature is a turn-off for readers.

Not to mention that getting to the point where your advertising income or the increase in sales from blogging will feed you is hard, daily work. Just establishing the basic traffic pattern will take you several months. Don't be fooled by the fact that you may have one hundred or more new visitors your first day, with a good strategy.

Your success with your blog and your goals for your site are still closely related. The first step to reaching any of those goals, is picking one, dissecting what it truly means and reaching it.

For example, if you want more traffic from blogging, you'll have to understand eventually what kind of traffic is created from blogging.

You may get new people, who read one thing and leave unless you connect to them in each post, and give them the choice to be reminded to return.

If you already have an ezine audience, you may get a group of readers who get to know you on another level, one that lets them get to know you as a person, which facilitates more repeat traffic, as they come to have more interaction with you, or to read what you say next.

With this, you'll have to be ready to give them some advice, a way to test what you say, and/or you'll have to learn what they discussions they want to read or participate in.

We could recreate various situations but they all boil down to the same message.

Getting more traffic from blogging means that you'll have to learn a bit more about the interactions that surround blogging, and why people read blogs to begin with. So will getting more sales from blogging